


Keeping the door closed

by where_am_i_am_here



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, No hospitals, POV Third Person, Romance, Romangst, Whump, i just like to make characters suffer what can i say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 12:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15001136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/where_am_i_am_here/pseuds/where_am_i_am_here
Summary: After he's been missing for two days, she's happy he's back. She's not happy he's back likethis.---Set between the Good and the Secret Ending of Seven's route, just diverting a bit from canon. (Therefore beware spoiler for Seven's real name, obviously.)More feels than plot.





	Keeping the door closed

She wakes up to a cluttering crash followed by the faint sound of the faucet running, and she knows immediately – not mind- but body-knows – what it means. That’s why she doesn’t think as she gets up and she doesn’t think as she steps towards the bathroom and into the light flowing out of it and she doesn’t think as she lays her eyes on the scene.

It’s been days.

It’s him.

That’s all.

She finds the faucet, steaming hot water running out of it, stained eyeglasses lying in the sink, a – their – first-aid kit ripped from the cabinet, its insides scattered across the tiles, forming a trail that leads to a – his – body thumped into the space between the sink and the bathtub.

She’s calm, or at least that’s how she interprets the whiteness filling her head, as she steps forward. Whatever she’s thinking – on whatever level – it doesn’t matter. She’s shutting out every thought knocking on the door of her consciousness, and she becomes a series of actions and sensations instead. Au-to-ma-tic.

His jacket in the bathtub. His eyes closed. His face white – so white, she thinks, before she slams the door shut again. A pool of blood beneath him, beneath the left side of his waist, the one facing the bathtub. She kneels down. His hands dried blood. The left side of his face dried blood. Blood. Blood, she thinks. How much is a lot?

She places her fingers on the soft skin beneath his jaw and it – it, his pulse, he has a pulse – sends an electric shock through her fingertips into her spine, warmth, he’s warm, and the warmth is spreading to her stomach, into the place of the whiteness in her head, into her frozen veins, into her eyes and burns them – he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive – and she takes his face in her hands and places a kiss on his forehead and she’s alive as well.

She turns to the pool of blood and the dark stain on his shirt and she lifts the fabric to find an angry red valley torn across the side of his, from front to back, right between his ribs and hips, and he gasps.

Saeyoung looks at her and for a moment she doesn’t know if he sees her. “N-n-no hospi-,” no more than a whisper, and she nods. He nods back, cautiously. Then he gestures towards the first-aid kit. “Can you- I-“ He takes a sharp breath and squeezes his eyes. “I wanted to, uhm- you know.”

“It’s okay. You’ll be okay.” She hears herself say it more than she feels it, over and over again. What is okay? Nothing is okay. What the hell is she talking about?

It works though, miraculously, on him at least. He lets out a shaky breath and leans his head against the wall, matching his face in color.

“We need to lay you down first,” she says. The rest of her words get tangled in her throat, suffocating her before they reach her mouth. She swallows hard. She must keep the door closed. Just a little while longer.

Slowly they shift him until he’s laying on his side, staring at the empty corridor, listening to the water rushing in the sink, or maybe his own pulse rushing in his ears. In this moment, that patch of skin on his waist doesn’t belong to him; as if something took a bite out of him, but also burning, grating. He’s thinking too much. He can’t think of it. He takes another deep breath, and although the air is cool it doesn’t filter through his lungs into the rest of his body to the sight of fire, it doesn’t cool him from the inside, and he tries not to feel it. Not part of him anymore.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” he says quietly.

“… It’s okay,” she says, against her will. Her eyes burn again. The door. “I’m happy you’re back.” She fumbles with the antiseptic wipes which seem thin and insignificant against his wound, which is suddenly so big and overwhelming she almost drops them. She shouldn’t use them anyway. Soap, a bowl of water, a soft towel… The door inside her is shaking, about to break at the hinges. She will fail, she will fail, oh god, she will fail. There’s just too much.

“I’m not happy about _how_ you’re back,” she says, her calm voice betraying her emotions.

“I know.” His hand finds her thigh and splinters rain from the door. She doesn’t want to cry. “I’m sorry, I’m so so- I don’t-“

“I’ll clean it now,” she says.

“… Okay.”

He winces, and jerks up sometimes, muscles under her hands tensing up while she dabs at his skin, around the gash, but he doesn’t make a sound and neither does she. She finishes the bandage as best as she can. She thinks about whether his fingers pressing into her thigh will leave marks.

Softly she sits him back up. The warmth from before is lingering all over him and when his head leans against the tiles again, she runs her fingers through his hair, over his forehead, his ears, his lips, his eyes and they open. She brushes his cheek. “Let me get you something to drink.”

She comes back with a plastic cup, fills it under the still running faucet before turning it off. He silently waits for her to finish her rummaging through the first-aid kit, then takes a sip.

“Thank you,” he whispers, his voice raspy, raw. She can see him flinching slightly as he downs the painkillers. He sets the cup on the edge of the tub.

“Help me take off your shirt. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She lifts it and pulls it up up up and he lifts his back off the wall and she lifts the shirt further up over his head and off, and each advancing centimeter she wishes more and more she could unsee it. She presses her lips together as she looks for the towel, wishes her ribs can keep withstanding the beating of her frantic caged heart while she places his glasses by the sink, wills away the thunderous cloud in her head that commands her to run out and destroy who did this to him.

She leans over him and gathers his bloodstained jacket and drops it on top of his bloodstained shirt. Then she takes off his jeans and socks and says sorry when he flinches and drops them on top of the jacket and shirt. She showers the bathtub and watches the stains drift into the drain and imagines it were just as easy to get rid of his pain. Shower it off.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she says again and holds him as he steps into the tub. She tells him to wait while she washes the floor, the pool of blood, and while she takes his clothes to their pile of laundry although it looks like they, these two piles of clothes, are from two separate worlds. She lets a sob shake her, violently and softly, and she’s both thankful and defiant in the face of how much she can love.

When she comes back he has his head on his knees and she wonders whether he heard her.

She sits down next to the tub – the spot of the pool of blood now clean but still radiating with an afterimage – and wrings the small wet towel in her hands. She gently slides it across his shoulder. He takes a sharp breath.

“Don’t you want to tell me what happened?”

“Do you really want to know?”

She stops. Huffs. “Of course. You know, I do.” Then she circles the towel around the blue-grey-green hues spreading across his shoulder blade, around the accompanying scratches.

He looks at her, eyes piercing then soft, then looking away.

“This is so- It’s so-“ He presses his hands into each other, starts kneading his knuckles, pressing his nails into the small spaces between them- She puts her hand on his, smoothening his hands under her palm. He tenses up. “So- How can I make you do this? How can I keep making you do- why-“

“Saeyoung, stop. Enough.” She combs her fingers through his hair, out of his face that is still so so warm. In her head she fumbles for that number he once told her to remember, the one she’ll need if he keeps getting warmer and if the blood keeps licking through his bandages. “Do you want to tell me what happened or do you not?”

He bites his lip. “I… They got me, obviously.” He looks ahead which is also back. “You don’t need to know who, just… it’s taken care of now. Now it is. But… they got me. Hit in the head, surprise surprise.” She softly urges him to turn towards her so she can look for it.

“It’s just… It’s just a bump.”

“It made you bleed.”

“… When I woke up I couldn’t move. Hands bound.” She lets her own hand wander, interlacing her fingers within his, bringing his hand up to her face, to her mouth and she briefly feels the sting of where the ropes scratched his wrists sore when she just barely kisses the spot.

Color comes back to his face, but he doesn’t pull his hand back.

“I… knew immediately.” His voice is low and his eyes dark. “I knew they would… huh, interrogate me. What I didn’t know was whether they knew about you.” His grip tightens. “You know I did everything to- I made sure you don’t exist to them, right?”

“I know.”

“I made sure- I did every-“ He sighs. “I was so scared, I could barely hear what they were saying. I was just waiting for your name to drop, I was-“

“It’s okay. Nothing happened. You did good, Saeyoung.” She wipes the side of his face, where dried blood mixed with silent tears. She can feel one dripping off her own chin as she makes herself smile a little. “I’m alright.” It’s only half true and they both know it.

He laughs shortly; a desperate instinctive relief. “I didn’t say anything. I was waiting but they never mentioned you, so… They didn’t like that, obviously.” A tiny wince when the towel grazes his ribs. A shiver. She has to get him warm soon.

“After a while they stopped paying attention to me. Maybe they found someone else who was more promising… I… managed to wiggle out of those ropes. Took down a few guards. They had guns.” She thinks of the valley across the skin of his side, thinks of the shockwaves bullets bring with them, of ruptured organs and internal bleeding, all those things she heard about, and of that phone number shining brightly in her head. Her fingertips are buzzing.

He closes his eyes and leans into her hands. “… Adrenaline’s wearing off.”

“You were gone for two days.”

“I got out,” he continues, whispering, taking half a breath. “Called whoever I had to call.”

“Except the ambulance.”

“… You know why…”

She blinks, squeezes his hand, musters what hopefully looks like a reassuring smile. “I’ll make sure you’ll be fine.”

And she leans over and she gives him a kiss, and he gives it back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is possibly the cheesiest thing I wrote, so my absolute respect and kudos if you got this far.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading!


End file.
